[Bessie Head's novels] are strange, ambiguous, deeply personal books which initially do not seem to be 'political' in any ordinary sense of the word. On the contrary, any reader with either Marxist or Pan-Africanist political affinities is likely to be irritated by the seeming emphasis on the quest for personal contentment, the abdication of political kingship—metaphorically in When Rain Clouds Gather, literally in Maru, and one might say wholesale in A Question of Power. The novelist's preoccupations would seem to suggest a steady progression from the first novel to the third into ever murkier depths of alienation from the currents of South African, and African, matters of politics and power—indeed in A Question of Power we are taken nightmarishly into the central character's process of mental breakdown, through lurid cascades of hallucination and a pathological blurring of the frontiers between insanity and any kind of normalcy. It is precisely this journeying into the various characters' most secret interior recesses of mind and (we must not fight shy of the word) of soul, that gives the three novels a quite remarkable cohesion and makes them a sort of trilogy…. It seems to me that with Bessie Head … each novel both strikes out anew, and also re-shoulders the same burden. It is as if one were observing a process that involves simultaneously progression, introgression, and circumgression, but also (and here I believe lies her particular creative power) organic growth in both her art and her central concerns. For all our being lured as readers into the labyrinth of Elizabeth's tortured mind in A Question of Power, and then, as it were, left there to face with her the phantasmagoric riot of nightmare and horror, one nevertheless senses throughout that the imagination which unleashes this fevered torrent resides in a creative mind that is exceedingly tough. It is not just that the fictional character emerges worn down yet regenerated and incredibly alive still after her long ordeal, but that her experience at the narrative level is also a figuring of the creative imagination in our time—that that process is both part of the multi-layered theme and the method of its communication. And that process as an embodiment of the novelist's art is a tough, demanding labour. (p. 175)

There are two major clues to the overall homogeneity of Bessie Head's novels. It is impossible to avoid noticing how frequently the words 'control' and 'prison' (and phrases and images of equivalent value) occur in all three novels, in many different ways certainly, and probably not as an altogether conscious patterning. 'Control' occurs in contexts tending towards the idea of control over appetites felt as detonators that set off the explosions in individual lives, no less than in the affairs of mankind, which leave those broken trails of blasted humanity that are a peculiar mark of our times. 'Prison' occurs in more varied uses, but most often related to a voluntary shutting of oneself away from what goes on around one. Sometimes it may be straight escapism or alienation, but more often it suggests a willed control over a naturally outgoing personality, an imprisonment not for stagnation but for recollection and renewal—a severely practical self-imposed isolation which is part of natural growth. Like the silk-worm's cocoon, it is made for shelter, while strengths are gathered for outbreak and a fresh continuance. (p. 176)

To the characters [in When Rain Clouds Gather], Golema Mmidi may be a kind of pastoral retreat after their earlier rough encounters with life, but the haven is a place of tough, demanding labour, of recurrent crises, of improvisation and ingenuity, of the constant threat of disruption from a power-hungry, resentful local chief. Their co-operative efforts constitute an image of creativity in which sweat and imagination, harsh reality and an ultimate dream to be fulfilled are mixed in just about equal proportions. Out of this creative, co-operative enterprise of constructive energy Bessie Head generates a powerful sense of potential fulfilment for characters who have jealously guarded, enclosed, shut up tightly their private individualities. Against a political background of self-indulgent, serf-owning traditional chiefs and self-seeking, new politicians more interested in power than people, the village of Golema Mmidi is offered as a difficult alternative: not so much a rural utopia for the Africa of the future to aim at, as a means of personal and economic independence and interdependence, where the qualities that count are benign austerity, reverence for the lives of ordinary people (whether university-educated experts or illiterate villagers), and, above all, the ability to break out of the prison of selfhood without destroying individual privacy and integrity.

Makhaya's quest for personal freedom was a flight not only from South Africa's police-van sirens and the burden of oppression, but also from the personal demands upon him of his immediate relations. The last thing he is looking for when he enters Botswana is a new network of intimate relationships or a new struggle against a different oppression. And of course he finds both. That is why the 'peaceful haven' idea in the book is really very deceptive. Golema Mmidi is no Garden of Eden, even if its potentialities are indeed richer than the South African life Makhaya left behind could offer him. (p. 177)

Makhaya does find innocence, trust, and respect, though not as unqualified absolutes. He has to give of himself both in physical labour and in the opening of the cell door to his private sanctum. His marriage to Paulina Sebeso near the end of the novel is, of course, also a finding of himself, with the ghosts of his former 'gray graveyard' life no longer visible, now, in the merciful darkness of Paulina's hut…. (p. 178)

The precise relationship between individual freedom and political independence, and between a guarded core of privacy and an unbudding towards others, may seem rather elusive, perhaps even mystical, in my reading of the novel, and I see it as one of the weaknesses of When Rain Clouds Gather. It is a straightforward narrative with no unexpected tricks of technique and very down-to-earth in the minutiae of an agricultural hard grind of a way of life…. There are moments of melodrama and excessive romanticism, but the real life of the novel is of creativity, resilience, reconstruction, fulfilment. Of the six major characters, four are themselves Batswana but all are in one sense or another handicapped exiles, learning how to mend their lives in the exacting but ultimately viable sands of Golema Mmidi. It is the vision behind their effortful embracing of exile that gives Bessie Head's first novel an unusual maturity. (pp. 178-79)

[Maru] immediately proclaims itself as technically a very different sort of book. The first six pages present the outcome of the events narrated in the rest of the novel, and, though they are essential for our adequate grasp of how those events unfold, they don't make sense at first, not until one has read to the end. The opening is thus both a species of sealed orders for the reader and an epilogue. And are we sure, at the end, that the two chief male characters, Maru and Moleka, who are close, intimate friends until they become bitter antagonists, are indeed two separate fictional characters, or that they are symbolic extensions of contending character-traits within the same man? (p. 179)

Maru's methods, 'cold, calculating and ruthless', are the normal methods of those who seek and wield power, and yet Maru's role in the novel is the very antithesis of power-wielding. He renounces the kingdom of political power in favour of the kingdom of love. But before he does so, he manipulates, engineers, 'fixes' the delicate relationships among himself, his sister Dikeledi, his friend Moleka, and Margaret the Masarwa woman, with whom both he and Moleka are in love. With the help of his three spies, Maru is able to manoeuvre Moleka against his real will to marry Dikeledi, who loves him; Maru is then able to marry Margaret, whom Moleka really loves. And Maru can exert such a persuasive influence upon Margaret that she begins to learn to love him, though it is Moleka with whom she has been secretly in love since her arrival in the village. (p. 180)

Maru's almost god-like perspicacity justifies his seemingly devious methods of preventing Moleka from obtaining Margaret's love. Maru knows that because his kingdom is of love, he has the strength to marry Margaret and live by all the consequences. (pp. 181-82)

Maru is no god. He remains a man with doubts. We know from the beginning that he and Margaret have not got away to another Garden of Eden. Rich and fulfilled and symbolically healthful as their life together is, it nevertheless has shadows and questions over it. Though Maru has obeyed the voices of the gods in his heart and trusts them, the closed door in Moleka's heart still hides an uncertainty….

This doubt and with it his willingness to give up Margaret, despite his deep love for her, if he should one day be proved wrong about Moleka, comes in those pages of introductory epilogue that I mentioned earlier, and throughout the novel influences our view of Maru and his actions.

On the one hand Maru's marriage is a deeply personal thing. He knows he 'could not marry a tribe or race.'… On the other hand the marriage also carries a considerable political symbolism. (p. 182)

Much more than When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru is a novel about interior experience, about thinking, feeling, sensing, about control over rebellious lusts of the spirit; and, ironically, ambiguously, in Bessie Head's comprehending vision, it is also a more 'political' novel than When Rain Clouds Gather. I am not sure that the two things are satisfyingly fused, even whether it is the sort of novel in which they should be so fused, but I am much impressed and moved by the power with which they are conveyed. That power resides in the vitality of the enterprise, which projects the personal and the political implications in such vivid, authentic parallels that one feels they are being closely held together, like the lengths of steel on a railway track, which fuse only in optical illusion and are indeed useless if they don't maintain their divided parallelism….

Bessie Head's most recent novel, A Question of Power, is clearly more ambitious than its two predecessors, and less immediately accessible, and altogether a more risky undertaking. The movement here is even deeper (and more disturbingly so) into the vast caverns of interior personal experience. (p. 183)

Bessie Head's common-sensical rootedness in the earthy level of everyday reality is still there to anchor for the reader the terrifying world of Elizabeth's hallucinations, but it is the events of that world that dominate the book. Even more than in the two earlier novels, one finds an intimate relationship between an individual character's private odyssey of the soul and public convulsions that range across the world and from one civilization to another. To see Bessie Head's handling of Elizabeth's mental instability as a clever literary device to make possible an epic confrontation between Good and Evil within the confines of a realist novel, is to underestimate the achievement. One wonders again and again whether the phantom world that comes to life whenever Elizabeth is alone in her hut could have been invented by a novelist who had not herself gone through similar experiences, so frighteningly and authentically does it all pass before one's eyes. But there is no confusion of identity between the novelist and the character, and Bessie Head makes one realize often how close is the similarity between the most fevered creations of a deranged mind and the insanities of deranged societies. (pp. 183-84)

The characteristic Bessie Head irony comes out in the fact that even as Elizabeth, the South African coloured refugee among the Batswana, finds herself screaming in her nightmares that she hates black Africans, she is none the less in what appears to her the almost dream-like world of her workaday activities in the co-operative vegetable garden, forging, steadily and genuinely, links of personal regard and affection with the Batswana villagers and with the foreign helpers. The last words of the novel are 'a gesture of belonging' … as Elizabeth settles herself for her first untortured night's sleep in three years, annealed both spiritually and socially, as in imagination she places one soft hand over her land.

I do not believe that Bessie Head's novels are offering anything as facile as universal brotherhood and love for a political blueprint for either South Africa or all of Africa. In Maru common sense is described as the next best thing to changing the world on the basis of love of mankind. What the three novels do say very clearly is that whoever exercises political power, however laudable his aims, will trample upon the faces and limbs of ordinary people, and will lust in that trampling. That horrible obscenity mankind must recognize in its collective interior soul. The corollary is not liberal abstention from action, but rather modest action in very practical terms, and with individual hearts flushed and cleansed for collective purpose. The divinity that she acknowledges is a new, less arrogant kind of humanism, a remorseless God who demands that iron integrity in personal conduct should inform political action too. Of course the novels don't sermonize like this, but grow out of a moral basis of this kind of order. (p. 185)

In the development of the South African novel, this disturbing toughness of Bessie Head's creative imagination returns to us that gesture of belonging with which A Question of Power ends. All three novels are fraught with the loneliness and despair of exile, but the resilience of the exiled characters is even more remarkable. Bessie Head refuses to look for the deceiving gleam that draws one to expect the dawn of liberation in the South, but accepts what the meagre, even parched, present offers. (p. 186)